The Laurier community is invited to attend public talks by two key innovators in cultural analysis: Renato Rosaldo

1. The Laurier community is invited to attend public talks by two key innovators in cultural analysis: • Renato Rosaldo • "Stories, truth and fiction: Reflections on ethnographic analysis" • Tuesday 31 October 5:30 pm; Paul Martin Centre • Mary Louise Pratt • "Language and contemporary geopolitics" • Wednesday 1 November 5:00 pm; Paul Martin Centre

2. You will have the opportunity to improve your participation grade in this course by writing a one-page, double-spaced synthesis of the main ideas discussed in EITHER one of the two talks.

3. Based on what you have read so far, what can you say about the movie we saw last class?

4. Modern yoga is not a pristine ancient practice, but rather a transnational cultural product.

5. Modernity • “A critical mode of engagement with the world – a project – that assumes that unlimited progress is possible and desirable.”

6. Alternative Modernities • Fractured and perpetual projects that reflect a range of different aspirations.

7. Health and Freedom • Symbolic cart through which yoga was brought to audiences in the United States and Europe. • Yoga’s appeal lay in a universal spiritual framework that was non-exclusive and “scientific” (testable through practice).

8. Yoga • Succeeded because it provided a great method for achieving the goal of self-development. • Fits within the “good life” = living a modern, engaged life while being able to alleviate the problems this kind of life creates.

9. Focus • Ideological community deriving from the teachings of Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh.

10. Multi-Sited Research • For Strauss means: • not only going to several different places, but • looking at non-geographically bounded sites of interactive research.

11. Different places are tied together by a shared frame of reference.

12. Shared Frame of Reference (or matrix) • Defined by individual actors, institutions, paradigms, and products, with their own characteristics, histories and power relative to each other.

13. Vivekananda (1863-1902)

14. Founded the Ramakrishna Mission and the Vedanta Societies in India and the West.

15. Vivekananda • Crystallized and popularized many different philosophical paths into four key categories and offered these to a public hungry for practical instruction in spiritual progress.

16. Four Key Categories of Yoga: • Raja Yoga (techniques of moral, physical, and mental discipline as defined in Patanjali’s eight limbs) • Bhakti Yoga (the path of love and devotion) • Jnana (the path of knowledge and intellectual learning) • Karma Yoga (the path of work and selfless service to others)

17. Reconciled various Hindu philosophic traditions with modern science, creating a universal, rational and practical religion based on self-improvement and service to others.

18. Vivekananda • To demonstrate the rationality of spiritual belief, he encouraged his followers to judge his recommendations for spiritual enlightenment for themselves = through practice and experiential knowledge.

19. “Knowledge has no value without personal experience”

20. Yoga • A way to navigate the dangers of modernity without falling pray to materialism.

21. Jivanmukhti • “Living liberation” here and now, in the context of modern life.

22. Swami Sivananda (1887-1963)

23. Sivananda • Arrived in Rishikesh in 1924, where he renounced worldly life and became a monk. • Settled in to a life of meditation and service on the banks of the Ganga river.

24. Sivananda • His reputation began to grow. • Aspiring meditators began to head north to Rishikesh beginning in the mid-1920s. • He published his first book of yoga teachings in 1929.

25. Divine Life Society • Sivananda’s official ashram, established in 1936 with the help of a large community of international disciples as well as locals.

26. Through the flow of people and ideas through printed articles and books, Sivananda’s organization enabled the development of an “imagined community” of yoga practitioners.

27. Sivananda promoted the conflation of Western ideas of individual freedom with Hindu notions of spiritual liberation.

28. Sivananda • Focused on developing the essential traits of middle-class conformity = the ability to adjust, adapt and accommodate. • Preached across India the need for tolerance, love, understanding and harmony. These ideas helped perfect the colonial subject as well as the national citizen.

29. Sivananda’s approach to solving the world’s problems • Grounded in personal reform (physical and spiritual), and the notion that if each individual made him or herself into a better person, the world would be a better place. • More personal than political = focused on personal health and freedom.

30. “The realization of the oneness of the Self with all other selves is key to both individual bliss and world peace.”

31. Sivananda • Helped erode the distinction between religious pilgrimage and secular tourism. • Created what Strauss calls “oasis regimes.”

32. “Oasis Regimes” • Spaces where practitioners can engage in an ascetic lifestyle for a short while in order to improve their stressful lives and the world around them. • These oases, first developed in India, soon took over the 5 continents, in what Strauss calls an exercise in empire-building.

33. Sivananda • First to promote the “export guru” as an authentic Indian product. • Since the late 1950s young swamis went on missions to other parts of India and the world.

34. “Imagined Community” of Yoga Practitioners • A global community of people who, though rarely acquainted to each other face-to-face, feel connected through interest in and practice of yoga.